Ethnic Foods As Unprepared Materials and As Cuisines in a Culture-Based Development Project in Southwest China

Xu Wu East China Normal University, Shanghai Ethnic Foods as Unprepared Materials and as Cuisines in a Culture-based Development Project in Southwest China In contemporary China, urban consumers often imagine that the unprepared foods produced in rural areas (often less developed and occupied by ethnic minorities) are pollution free, healthy, and environmentally friendly. During a recent culture-based development project in southwest China, villagers in several ethnic minority villages proposed that local foods could act as cultural resources for rural development. However, instead of highlighting the ethnic affiliation of their unprepared foods, villagers insisted on marketing their cuisines (cooked or prepared foods) under the new brand name of nongjiale (“farmers’ joy”). My argument is that the ethnic titles of these minority groups have been closely associated with negative connotations and so-called “unusual cuisines” (yiwei). This association cannot be easily removed. It is already rooted in public discourse and present throughout historical documents. However, the rebranding of restaurants as nongjiale has brought local villagers a new, positive marketing strategy. In urban and mainstream Chinese cultural areas, nongjiale connotes that food is organic, nutritious, ecological, and part of a return to nature. keywords: ethnic minority food—nongjiale restaurants—“unusual cuisines” (yiwei)—southwest China Asian Ethnology Volume 75, Number 2 • 2016, 419–439 © Nanzan Institute for Religion and Culture his study is based on fieldwork for the final evaluation of the United Nation’s TChina Culture and Development Partnership Framework (CCdPF) project, which took place in five ethnic minority villages (belonging to Miao, Dong, De’ang, and Jingpo) in Guizhou and Yunnan in 2011. It is also based on my obser- vations over fifteen years of how ethnic minorities’ foods are marketed in China. The CCdPF project, carried out in southwest China (mainly in the Guizhou and Yunnan provinces) from 2008–2011, was one of the four Joint Programs in China funded by the Millennium Development Goals Achievement Fund (MdG-F). This fund was established by the Spanish government and the uN in 2006. In respond- ing to the “Thematic Window on Culture and Development” opened under the Spanish MdG Achievement Fund, CCdPF aimed to integrate culture into development, specifically in selected marginalized areas inhabited by ethnic minorities in China. Contemporary Chinese urban consumers often imagine that foods produced in less-developed areas, especially mountain villages belonging to ethnic minorities, are ecological and pollution-free. Accordingly, the CCdPF project accepted villagers’ suggestions and identified local foods in participating villages as cultural resources for rural development. During the project, one initiative involved grow- ing organic foods for the city markets. This entailed several participating villages produce many kinds of vegetables, wild plants, local varieties of rice, fish raised in paddies, and other produce. Often labeled as “pollution-free vegetables” (wugong- hai shucai) or “ecological foods” (shengtai shipin), these products were considered valuable by the urban Chinese I met during my fieldwork. At the beginning of the project, the participating villagers also proposed that they market their cuisine (cooked food) under the new brand name nongjiale (“farmers’ joy”) restaurants (Cai 2009, 23–24). With the essential support of CCdPF, several villages have made great progress in their nongjiale initiatives. When I visited a De’ang village and conducted interviews regarding the achieve- ments and difficulties encountered since the project was launched under CCdPF, villagers demonstrated their ability to run nongjiale restaurants according to brand guidelines by inviting visitors from outside for a dinner party of local dishes. Some urban consumers I met during my 2011 fieldwork showed great interest in the unprocessed local food originating from the villages, praising it as “pollution- 420 | Asian Ethnology Volume 75, Number 2 • 2016 wu: ethNiC Foods iN southwest ChiNa | 421 free” or “real ecological food.” However, when they had a chance to eat the food in the villages, some of them expressed different attitudes and ideas. One urban elite (an official from a provincial capital city) told me that he usually turned down any invitation to dinner in Dong villages, since Dong cuisine normally contained a dish of raw fish. According to him, as a cuisine this dish was unhygienic because the fish were raised in paddies, the local cesspool for human waste. This imagined connection between the raw fish and human waste brought feelings of disgust to consumers. However, this gentleman did accept an invitation to a dinner party where he ate at a villager-run restaurant in an ethnic De’ang village. I asked him why De’ang cuisine in this village was acceptable to him, and he explained that this restaurant was better than those found in Dong villages since it had completed the training process required to create a nongjiale restaurant. Another consumer, a middle-aged urbanite, commented after a meal at the nongjiale restaurant of the De’ang village: “This is the first time I have eaten De’ang food in the last forty years.” He mentioned that De’ang people were famous for their “stinky foods,” one of the famous “unusual cuisines” (yiwei) of minorities in Yunnan province. According to him, in the past it seemed that the De’ang did not eat meat until the meat reeked and became rotten. This ethnic group, as such, used to be called the “stinky Benglong.”1 During my field research I became curious about urban consumers’ different ideas regarding ethnic foods as unprepared (that is, some ethnic minority foods are raw, but at the same time “prepared”) and as prepared cuisines. Additionally, I wanted to know why villagers chose “nongjiale,” rather than their ethnic group names to market their restaurants. My argument is that the ethnic titles of certain minority groups have been closely associated with “unusual cuisines” and have had negative connotations. This association cannot be easily removed; it is already rooted in public discourse and has the support of many historical documents and recordings. Replacing the meaning of “ethnicity” with that of “farming” when naming local cuisines of marginalized populations is important as it helps create the poten- tial to add new, positive meanings to previously marginalized foods. If this change does not occur, these local foods will remain firmly associated with, and limited by, a series of systematized negative meanings which have accumulated throughout Chinese history and have been reinforced by the construction of ethnicity in the Chinese mass media in recent decades. Marketing MarGiNal Foods FroM aN aNthroPoloGiCal PersPeCtive Foods and foodways serve as vehicles for meanings of all kinds (MiNtz 2001, 274) and can help express and construct individual and group identities, such as interpersonal relations or membership in a social class or ethnic group (Cheung 2001, 83; Lefferts 2005). Anthropologists such as Mary DouGlas (1972) and Levi-Strauss (1983) have long explored the cultural meanings of 422 | Asian Ethnology 75/2 • 2016 foods. One type of food can accumulate different meanings in different contexts (YaN 2005; MiNtz 1985). As an important part of foodscapes, restaurants also have overwhelmingly symbolic functions (SheltoN 1990; SwisloCki 2009) and can shape customers’ thinking and behavior (SheltoN 1990). Restaurants not only provide a window for understanding existing social meanings/codes, social relations, identities, and power structures, but also have the ability to transform food meanings (YaN 2005, 81; OhNuki-TierNey 1999). As strong carriers and transformers of meaning, both foods and restaurants have been used to highlight or blur existing identity boundaries (YaN 2005, 81; WatsoN 1987). Accordingly, the manipulation of food meanings is essential to marketing marginalized ethnic foods (FiNNis 2012; Charles 2002; TaN 2001).2 Anthropologists have noted there are generally two ways for people to deal with ethnic foods: one can either highlight or hide the ethnic affiliation of foods. The first has been mainly used for political ends, such as establishing a connection with an ethnic group by consuming its distinctive or representative foods (for example, sinonggi, the sago flour in Indonesia; see Utari 2012). The second has occurred in the marketing of ethnic foods to mainstream consumers, as demonstrated in case studies of avocados in the U.S. (Charles 2002), alpaca meat in Peru (Markow- itz 2012), and minor millets in India (FiNNis 2012a). There have also been cases in which the local foods of ethnic areas have been marketed specifically as ethnic foods, and the marketing has resulted in no sustainable market (Wu 2003). These studies have shown that the symbolic meanings associated with ethnic foods matter and that, as FiNNis says, “the success of an attempt to take a marginal food into wider contexts may therefore depend on whether its symbolic status is effectively repositioned” (2012b, 9). Hiding the ethnic association of food has been one of the key strategies used in such repositioning, such as for avocados, minor millets, and alpaca meat in the U.S., India, and Peru respectively. Existing scholarship has shown that a number of things need to be done in order to help marginal foods change meanings: rebranding requires development organizations to help reimagine

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